Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

By Joe Dixon

Some people believe that God is the center of the moral universe. In fact, God is not moral at all. In this book, we rationally explore how it is impossible for either God or the Devil to serve any moral role whatsoever. If you want to understand morality, and how to be moral, you must understand how God can never help you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244790264

Joe Dixon

Joe Dixon writes about the decline and fall of the West. The West is being undermined by sinister forces.

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Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

Why God Should Go to Hell: How God Is Outside the Moral Order

Joe Dixon

Copyright © Joe Dixon 2019

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

Moral Unreality

When Orpheus, the legendary musician, poet and prophet, had his head torn off his shoulders and thrown into the river Hebrus, he kept singing as his head was carried along by the strong current. It’s impossible to kill off some voices. Sometimes, the dead don’t realize they’re dead. God is dead, but doesn’t know it. His morality is dead with him, but all across the world people still hear morality’s ghostly voice and mistake it for something real and objective.

Some people believe that God is the center of the moral universe. In fact, God is not moral at all. In this book, we rationally explore how it is impossible for either God or the Devil to serve any moral role whatsoever.

Some people believe in moral realism (moral objectivism) – the claim that objective moral facts and moral values exist like Platonic Forms, independently of our perception of them or our feelings, beliefs, opinions or subjective attitudes towards them. Moral facts are deemed as real as mathematical facts, and moral judgments as certain as mathematical proofs. In fact, only mathematical facts are real. All other facts are manmade interpretations. As Nietzsche said, There are no facts, only interpretations. … There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Mainstream religion, and its attendant morality, is the biggest possible misinterpretation of mathematical reality. People would behave entirely differently if they realized they inhabited a mathematical universe engaged in solving itself rather than a moral universe offering them a binary choice of heaven or hell, or positive or negative karma.

Reality is about the optimization of knowledge, of understanding, of reason and logic. It is not about the optimization or minimization of good or evil, which are just subjective human terms and labels. As Oscar Wilde said, Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

You would think that for a father to kill his son for no reason would seem to everyone to be an incontestable objective moral crime, yet the Christian God ordered Abraham to murder Isaac, and Abraham immediately agreed to do so. This unforgivable monster – an infernal father if ever there was one – is celebrated by three world religions, and billions of people, as a moral paragon, someone to be admired and emulated. That demonstrates that either these people have no moral compass and no moral sensibility at all, or all moral facts are anything that people want them to be, anything that serves their selfish agenda, which can never be a moral agenda by any conventional definition of morality, i.e. morality can never be that which you do because it suits you, regardless of others. What consideration did Abraham give to Isaac as he held his dagger to his son’s throat? From Isaac’s perspective, his father was immoral – willing to murder him to prove himself to his deity. Imagine if Isaac had worshiped a different God from Abraham. He would regard Abraham’s God as the anti-God, the Devil.

The moral con is the biggest con of all. It has been inflicted on the world by the priest-caste, the kingly-caste, and the super-rich elite to stop the people from accepting reason and logic as the means to organize and optimize society. The world rulers have plenty of use for billions of abject slaves on their knees praying to fictitious, invisible gods, and no use for billions of rational and logical men and women who can see through every lie the elite tell them to exploit them.

Reason and logic are the means to achieve human liberation. That’s why the elite have ensured that reason and logic are never taught, and everyone is instead subjected to insane religious faith and mysticism.

Free yourself. Embrace reason and logic. Sapere aude.

✽✽✽

Bertrand Russell said, The pursuit of truth, when it is whole-hearted, must ignore moral considerations; we cannot know in advance that the truth will turn out to be what is thought edifying in a given society.

The people that believe in moral realism – objective morality somehow encoded in the universe and available to all of us – set out to find it, and do. The pursuers of truth don’t set out to find moral realism, and don’t find it. They find mathematical rationalism, some of the mathematical features of which can be translated into moralistic terms, but which actually belong to the mathematical order, not the moral order.

Plato’s Form of the Good

Plato’s Form of the Good is not itself good, but things become good by reflecting it or participating in it. Christianity made the Form of the Good good itself by converting it into the Being of the Good – God, who now did personally embody goodness. Except he didn’t – not judging by the Christian Bible, a book of total immorality and depravity. In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine, the Father of the American Revolution, said, Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. The creature that inspired the Bible clearly never partook of Plato’s Form of the Good. It had no idea what Good was. But it knew all about evil, hence its grotesque behavior.

Aristotle’s God did not interact with humanity at all. He remained perfect precisely through the absence of his interaction with people and the world. He was the transcendent Form of the Good that stood permanently outside the immanent world.

Hegel’s temporal God – the evolving Geist (Mind/Spirit) – is dialectical, containing both good (thesis) and evil (antithesis) and the capacity to unify them (synthesis) and drive a process that converges on a final, Absolute state, consistent with the end of history.

Humans, not a transcendent God, create the dialectical opposition of good and evil, and every human defines good and evil differently. The conservative notion of good and evil is practically the opposite of the liberal notion. Then billions of humans personify the extremes (absolute good and absolute evil) as God and the Devil, respectively. Again, humans define God and the Devil in their own terms. The Gnostics regarded the Jewish God as the Devil. Jesus Christ called himself the son of the Jewish God.

These ideas of God and the Devil are human constructs, the extrapolations of dialectical concepts. They are the opposite poles of a dialectical system. Every moral agent is poised between the two poles and has to choose between them. The poles themselves are not moral agents since they have no moral choices to make. They cannot perform anything other than what they are programmed to do by their imagined essence (absolute good or absolute evil). God can do no evil and the Devil can do no good.

God is not the judge of good and evil – we are. God is simply the personification of what it would be to never choose evil, but, in God’s case, he has no choice. It’s not that God always chooses good and always resists evil. He has no choice at all. He is incapable of evil, hence he cannot be congratulated for his conduct any more than a programmed machine can. Equally, the Devil, even if he committed evil actions 100% of the time, could never actually be considered evil since he never had any choice in the matter, just as a shark, the serial killer of the sea, can never be blamed for killing. That’s what it does. That’s its nature, its essence. That’s what it must do to survive.

So, God is never good in any meaningful sense (he never exercises any will to overcome evil, any choice to do good rather than evil, and is never tempted by any alternative course of action) and the Devil is likewise never meaningfully evil. Neither chooses. They are not moral beings. They are strictly amoral, outside the moral domain entirely. Each is wholly constrained. Neither has free will.

You cannot be a moral agent if you lack free will, if you lack choice. Nor can you be presented as a moral exemplar since you are not moral at all.

In Aristotle’s system of hylomorphism (the combination of form and matter in Nature), two bookends are absent from the system: 1) prime matter (formless matter), and 2) God (matterless form). God is not hylomorphic because he contains no matter, and prime matter is not hylomorphic because it contains no form. Neither God nor prime matter can be encountered in Nature.

By analogy, the moral universe comprises all agents capable of doing both good and evil. It does not contain good and evil in themselves, the bookends of the system. The bookends can do either good or evil, not both, hence are excluded from the world of moral choice. You cannot go to God or the Devil for moral advice. They are not in the game. They do not know how to choose to do good or evil. They always do one or the other, robotically, unthinkingly, reflexively.

The aspiration to be as good as God is an aspiration to cease to be a moral agent. You do not want to perfect yourself morally, you wish to leave the system of morality altogether. Similarly, Hindus and Buddhists seek enlightenment in order to leave the karmic universe of samsara, not to make themselves karmically perfect, or to achieve exactly zero karmic debt. They seek to be akarmic, not karmic. They seek to be beyond karma. They don’t want to be karmically perfect within samsara. They want to exit samsara entirely. They want to transcend karma.

God and the Devil transcend morality. To join God or the Devil is to leave the moral sphere.

✽✽✽

God punishes you in hell for not being God, for not being perfect. Is that moral? Is that just? He created you (allegedly) and then punishes you for the nature he gave you. Why doesn’t he punish himself since he is the one responsible? Who is accountable if not him? It’s not as if you created your nature, independently of God. The first person admitted through the dark, dismal gates of hell should be God himself. No punishment, no matter how extreme, would ever be sufficient for him. This is the ultimate criminal that committed the ultimate crime.

God does not constitute an objective moral standard any more than the Form of the Good does. The Form of the Good is not itself good. Your task is to partake of it, not to be it. If the Form of the Good is not itself good, how can it communicate the good, and how can partaking of it make you good?

The manmade concept of goodness is all things to all men. Everyone defines the good differently. Plato merely asserted the existence of a Form of the Good that rose above mere opinion and belief. He did not prove its existence, he did not give a sufficient reason for it, he did not specify its ontology and how it interacted with the world (through what means?), and he did not make it clear why it is needed at all, beyond his mere decree. Is the universe good? If not, the Form of the Good, the defining Form of existence according to Plato, has failed.

When you pass judgment on a supposed objective moral standard – such as God or the Form of the Good – you have immediately acknowledged that it is not an objective standard at all. This is the whole problem. We can imagine a perfectly good being, but how many people can define perfect goodness? Yet if we can’t define it then it can never be objective. It can only ever be our subjective fantasy, our wish fulfillment. Plainly, the Christian God is simply asserted to be moral, but none of its actions are moral. They are horrific.

Aristotle’s God is perfect, but at the expense of not interacting with the world or humanity at all. Aristotle’s God is purely self-referential, uncontaminated by anything else. A purely self-referential moral standard is every bit as futile. Good = Good is not a moral formula. It’s a meaningless verbal, manmade tautology. The definition of good is what counts. Who will define it? How will it be defined? With respect to what principles will it be defined? Who will be the judge of it?

Humanity’s problem is that it associates the word good with an actual objective standard when in fact it is just a subjective description. You can’t reify good. To assert that something is good does not make it so. You do not confer ontological reality on something through assertion. Where is your evidence? Where is your proof? Where is your airtight rational and logical argument? What ontology and epistemology are you relying on?

Never forget that whatever you deem good, someone else deems evil and stands in opposition to you, denouncing you. That is therefore a subjective system, not objective.

The whole problem is that humanity cannot define an objective moral standard to which everyone would sign up. There is simply no such thing. Thinking types have very different standards from feeling types; sensing types see reality very differently from intuitive types; extraverts and introverts have very different worldviews; judging and perceiving types pass judgement in totally different ways, according to totally different criteria.

The idea that there is a one-size-fits-all moral standard is for the birds. It’s pure fantasy. Morality is, and always will be, the fallible creation of human nature, human language, human personality, human psychology, human sociology, human economics, human self-interest. It is always subjective and self-serving. As Nietzsche pointed out, it has a genealogy. It evolves. It mutates. It is subject to natural selection. It changes as humanity changes.

When it comes to morality, the Sophists are right: Man is the measure of all things. It is always humans measuring morality, never anything or anyone else measuring it, and measuring humanity by way of it.

When people say, God will judge you, they of course mean they will judge you. When has God judged anyone? Give a single example where God has sat in the judge’s chair in a human court and passed judgment on someone appropriately tried according to the objective moral law? Such a notion is a phantasm. It does not belong to the order of reality.

How could God judge anyone? What is the first defense the accused would make? – You made me. You are responsible.

God might say, I gave you free will. The accused would then say, "That’s on you. That was your choice. Was it a moral choice? If giving people free will leads to evil, why did you give them free will, and why do you condemn evil? You are responsible. Only you."

As Stendhal said, God’s only excuse is that he does not exist. God never has any excuse. It’s always God that’s on trial.

In the Garden of Eden, the choice God gave humanity was – Obey me or die! Obey me or be punished in hell forever. What kind of choice is that? It’s slavery. God gives you free will, but if you exercise it in any way contrary to his slave commandments, he sends you permanently to the cosmic torture chamber.

If you confer free will on people – through your own free choice – you cannot then also confer absolute pain and horror on them for exercising it. That is utterly Satanic. It is the definition of perversity. By any standard, it is immoral.

Although there is no objective morality, there are commonly accepted notions regarding morality. Although, in practice, people interpret these in their own way, they nevertheless provide a clear standard by which we may assess moral claims. For example, most people would agree that people are accountable for their own actions and not those of others. In Christianity, the entire human race was penalized in perpetuity for the actions of Adam and Eve. This cannot constitute anything other than a violation of morality, not via any absolute, objective, cosmic standard, but by the simple application of what general meaning humanity applies to morality.

The word moral is derived from the Latin moralis, meaning proper behavior of a person in society; pertaining to manners, mores, customs; conforming to moral rules. No one could say that it was moral to punish someone for a crime they never committed, a crime committed by someone else. Yet the Bible is full of such immorality. God slaughters the firstborn of Egypt, including newborn babies. What crime had these babies ever committed?

Faith

What is faith? It is the means by which the weak and simple-minded choose to believe weak and simple-minded things that make them happy, and to reject all hard and strong-minded truths provided by reason and logic.

Moral Realism?

Morality either exists or it does not. That is to say, morality either exists objectively, or it does not exist at all (in any independent sense), which then means that all claims concerning morality are strictly subjective, i.e. they are merely speculation, opinions and beliefs subjectively held by people.

Nietzsche said, "I am the first immoralist: that makes me the annihilator par excellence. I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist: [...] the self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite – into me – that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.

"Fundamentally, my term immoralist involves two negations. For one, I negate a type of man that has so far been considered supreme: the good, the benevolent, the beneficent. And then I negate a type of morality that has become prevalent and predominant as morality itself – the morality of decadence or, more concretely, Christian morality. ... Nobody yet has felt Christian morality to be beneath him: ... What defines me, what sets me apart from the whole rest of humanity is that I uncovered Christian morality. That is why I needed a word that had the meaning of a provocation for everybody. ... The concept of ‘God’ invented as a counter concept of life – everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole hostility unto death against life synthesized in this concept in a gruesome unity!"

Nietzsche found the idea that morality exists objectively ridiculous. In Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist and On the Genealogy of Morals, he demolished the standard claims made concerning the existence of objective morality. He clinically unmasked the ludicrous and false claims made by moralists. He explained the origin of our moral prejudices and traced their development over human history. Of course, the very fact that moral standards have changed dramatically over the centuries, and continue to rapidly mutate, proves that there is no absolute standard of morality that all humans recognize and to which they all subscribe.

No one on earth doubts that 1 + 1 = 2. But any moral system at all can be deconstructed in a second, as the history of moral philosophy shows. Nietzsche declared that people are Human, All Too Human, i.e. fallible and deluded, and he explicitly pronounced God dead.

God – in some form or other (including karma) – is the absolute standard to which all moralists appeal. If God does not exist, nor does objective morality.

Nietzsche insisted that a critique of moral values was essential, that the value of these values themselves must be called into question. He sought to expose the hypocrisy and false claims of moralists, and reveal their real agenda, which was invariably self-serving, hence immoral.

Nietzsche wrote, The end of Christianity – at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be replaced), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history; rebound from ‘God is truth’ to the fanatical faith ‘All is false’...

Nietzsche demonstrated how the morality of good and evil arose from an earlier and completely different morality of good and bad, of which the former was its effective inversion. The latter reflected a master morality, the latter a slave morality.

The fact that slave and master moralities can coexist shows how ridiculous, naive and illogical the claims are of those that defend an absolute morality. They themselves have an agenda they are seeking to promote to serve their own cause and it can be fully deconstructed and exposed for the sham it is.

Nietzsche, a deconstructionist long before that postmodern concept was invented, showed that the word good has two opposed meanings, one for masters and one for slaves. All claims regarding the existence of objective morality founder on the fact that any moral claim made by anyone will inevitably find its antithesis, whereby the exact opposite position is held. For every God, there is a Devil. But which, if either, is truly God? One man’s God is another man’s Devil, and vice versa.

In the good/bad master morality, good is associated with nobility and everything powerful and life-affirming. In the good/evil slave morality, the meaning of good is rendered the opposite of the original, aristocratic good, which is then inverted and rebranded as evil.

Nietzsche said that this inversion of values develops from the ressentiment of the powerful by the weak. The slaves define their morality in opposition to that of the masters.

Where is objective morality? As Thrasymachus said, Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. For justice read morality. People believe in whatever morality floats their boat, i.e. it is wholly subjective. Any claim they make can instantly be deconstructed and their political agenda exposed.

In the chilling Melian Dialogue featured by Thucydides in his seminal History of the Peloponnesian War, he described what the powerful Athenians said to the people of the island of Melos: ...we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses – either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of the wrong that you have done us – and make a long speech that would not be believed; and in return, we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although they are colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The weak, as Nietzsche understood, invent morality to try to curb the strong, and to rally themselves into a single group capable of defending itself against the strong. Morality is, in other words, a weapon. Weapons are tools of war, not instruments of the good. The weak many (the doves, the prey) use this weapon to defend themselves against the strong few (the hawks, the predators).

Morality is doxa (opinion), not episteme (knowledge). There are no rational and logical moral proofs of the kind you find in mathematics. Morality has nothing to do with logic. It does not belong to the class of logical objects that are susceptible to logical analysis. Most moral claims are in essence meaningless, just as most claims regarding God are. No ontological or epistemological significance can be attached to them.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism said that the fundamental axiom of his philosophy was the principle that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. Well, is it?! What’s moral about that? It is a principle for hedonists, not moralists.

Bentham suggested a calculating procedure – the hedonistic or felicific calculus – for measuring the moral status of any action. Does anyone actually perform such calculations? The idea is comical. As Dr. Pangloss might have said, All is for the happiest in the happiest of all possible worlds.

What do people even mean when they say that morality has objective existence? If it does, where is it and what is it? What is it made of? How does it interact with gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces? Where is it in space and time?

Followers of Eastern religion more or less claim that karma is an objectively existing moral force in the universe that directly affects the physical world, including DNA, in order to bring about appropriate karmic outcomes. No one has ever discovered any trace of objective karma.

In the West, absolute morality is normally assigned to God, but of course if God does not exist then this claim for the existence of absolute morality in God is instantly falsified. So, a moralist would have to prove the existence of God to justify their beliefs. Good luck with that.

Nietzsche trashed this entire project. Can you imagine the moralists in the present day believing themselves smarter than Nietzsche? What a joke. Moralists are just religious reactionaries and conservatives trying to